 | By Fred Langa Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 blog documents a little-known Win7 upgrade path from the Release Candidate. If you’re using the Windows 7 RC, you can upgrade directly to the final, retail release of Win7 Ultimate, though following this unsupported upgrade path isn’t for everyone. |
Switch the Windows 7 beta to the retail release
Michael Flitterman is using a Windows 7 beta, but he’d like to upgrade directly to a retail version. Doing so is usually forbidden by the Setup software, but Michael’s wondering whether there’s a workaround:
- “For the past few months, I’ve been using a beta version of Windows 7 — Win7 RC. I bought a retail copy of Win7 Ultimate, but now it seems there’s no way to upgrade the RC release directly to the final version.
“Do you know of any workaround that allows the upgrade so I don’t have to — again — spend endless hours reinstalling my apps? I know that I’m not alone in hoping there’s a way to do it.”
The process is surprisingly simple: You just have to edit one line in one setup file. Of course, the files on a setup DVD aren’t directly editable, so you must first copy all the files off the retail setup DVD to a hard drive or partition other than C:. (Windows setup will alter C:, so the copied setup files must be placed elsewhere.)
Navigate to the sources folder of the copied files and open cversion.ini in Notepad (or another text editor). The MinClient value stored in this file controls which Win7 versions are allowed as upgrade “clients.”
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